I cannot tell you how many times I have walked by a mirror and stopped short to pull my cheeks up toward my temples. For a very brief moment I look like I used to.Gone are the marionette lines I’ve gotten from worrying and laughing equally...I continue to examine myself in bits: forehead seems to not be the main problem, eyes have held up somewhat, but there are definitely little hoods closing in on them. Firmness, however, is gone. My neck has rings like redwood trees. The cheek droop courtesy of my mother’s genes has taken residency in my face and my jaw is no longer sharply defined or “snatched”,as I’ve heard it referred to in tik tok tutorials.I look at myself, and the adjectives that comes to mind are: soft,blurry, blobby. I have done the unthinkable-I have aged. Gasp.
Because I am an overthinker I of course dwell on this. I ponder on the possible reasons for this variety of panic we generally have at the prospect of aging; is it because we know that it’s here permanently, an unequivocal announcement of decline? Perhaps it is an uncomfortable reminder that it’s later than we think? I would not call it an overwhelming feeling, but it is most definitely a nagging one. I ask myself: Could it be possible that all this time I have embraced the wrong message? That I have looked in the wrong mirrors for meaning and sense of self? the memo I got my entre life and that continues to bombrad us every day is that youth is beauty and beauty is power, and therefore once you lose it , you in a way, are lost too.
When I was in my 20s, I remember enjoying flipping through magazines like Hola, and marveling at one never aging woman in particular who seemed to defy and bend the laws of time and physics. She now looks like a velociraptor but that notwithstanding, I became a religious SPF applier early on and knew way more about skincare than any person not studying to be an esthetician should at that age. I started out with Olay at 21 then lost the training wheels and made my way through Reviderm, PCA skin , Lancome, La Mer, Skinceuticals, and anything that promised preventing my face from ever being lined. Because the message had set in: lines were unacceptable and even ugly. My fool’s errand to perpetuate youth continued and so I graduated to Botox and other needles-in-the face situations. Once, my friend’s kid asked us why we were getting our flu shots in our foreheads.It seemed comical at the moment but now I realize that if it sems ridiculous to a child, it probably is.
As time passed, what was once a three step routine became a war chest. Once I went as far as to burn off my entire face with lasers to get rid of any spots which are telltale signs of age. Yes, you read that right, I consented to a self inflicted third degree burn in the face for the sake of youth. During all those years not once did I ever a stop to think what the purpose, philosophical reason or true motivation behind it all was, and most importantly did it come from somewhere inside of me or was it a construct from the outside, a dogma I adopted without really evaluating if it aligned with my own principles? I, the overthinker, didn’t think twice about why it seemed so important and reasonable to dedicate so many resources: time, energy, attention, intention and money to this never ending Sisyphean task of youth maintenance.
I came to realize that things fall apart faster than I can fix,repair or prevent them. I found myself stepping onto this hamster wheel of sorts and then getting to the point of figuratively screaming “Stop the ride! I want to get off!” The choices became clear :I could fight back for the remainder of my days and continue expending energy on the never ending and ever more aggressive project of retaining youth or I could, like Atlas when he had the world on his shoulders, shrug. I opted to shrug.
I shrug because I see the inevitable: loss in a fight against time and nature. Nature, that same force that makes the sun come up every day, that controls tides, that makes flowers bloom out of mere seeds. Do I know better than such a wise force?
I shrug because at 46 I have come to the full realization that my looks are not my currency and also not in the slightest way a measure of who I am, what I offer in the world, or of how I move through life.
I shrug because I have earned it and no magazine and no collective and no individual has the right to tell me what I should look like.
I shrug up because I straight up refuse to live up to expectations and standards that I did not set for myself. I have no interest in looking the same forever. I look forward to being old and having my face and my body reflect the fact that I have been on this planet for what is probably a bit more than half of my life now. I want an honest face. One that shows happiness and humor, laughter tears but also the other tears, the deep sadness of loss and grief, of betrayals and starting overs. In short, a face that is a testament to my life. One that says, this one’s been through it. Notice I say my life. Everything I’ve written here is true for me, might not be so for others. Maybe it’s just me who has been looking at the wrong mirrors to try to see myself but I get a feeling it’s not. And if you already think like me, then you came to this realization sooner than I did: that it’s the mirror where you see yourself as a whole that counts not the one where you get gussied up and edit for the world’s approval. If you are good with the first one, measuring up to the second one becomes weirdly and pointedly unimportant. The ironic bit of it all is that we do so much to look good on the outside which even when achieved can feel hollow - when perhaps the same effort should be put in to get our inner life squared away: to strive to attain things like peace, satisfaction, harmony and health rather than buying the perfect face. to feel GOOD. I will never be a woman who stops traffic or looks 25 years younger and that’s quite alright. I have finally seen myself in the mirror that matters and I have the only approval I needed all along-my own.
